I have an ASUS X53S laptop and the mint install went fine and I was very impressed with how well everything worked right out of the box. I then realized that I was getting very bad battery life and read somewhere to install the nvidia drivers. I went to do that first trying nvidia-current and it totally borked my graphics so I undid that and when I did I don't appear to have the cinnamon menu. I went ahead and tried installing the nvidia driver that I downloaded direct from Nvidia's site and that also didn't work so I uninstalled that as well.

My graphics are back at the normal resolution but instead of seeing "Menu" on the menu button it's the linux mint logo and it's the single column menu. I don't really know if this is cinnamon or if it's actually running gnome or something because Cinnamon is somehow messed up.

1- reinstall mint (it's faster and easier)2- to get nvidia to work in that hardware you need https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebeewhy? because your laptop has 2 gpus (optimus system - intel+nvidia) and only bumblebee can manage that conf.

Thanks for the advice. That's exactly what I did. I had found a reference to Bumblebee elsewhere and did a little research. I ended up just installing bbswitch on mine since I don't really need the acceleration. Now getting much better battery life. - Thanks again.

Well now this is interesting. I had a breaker trip in this room and the system went down hard. I booted it back up and now the mint menu is back and the graphics seem to be working. I also checked to see if it is still selected on the proprietary drivers and it looks like it is. Is there a way to tell for sure?